


A Gift to Remember

by modsenga



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Also lots of pretty rocks, Anal Fingering, First Time (sort of), First Time Penetration, Fluff, Hand Jobs, Kissing, M/M, Oral Sex, Porn with Feelings, Trust-building, angbang, no smut in the first chapter, perfectionist dork lord wanna-be, poor Mai just can’t get it right, pseudo-geology, tfw your creativity leaves you for another artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 15:23:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18013400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modsenga/pseuds/modsenga
Summary: Since Mairon joined forces with Melkor, Melkor has given him so much.  Mairon feels he has yet to return the favor.  But what can a single forge Maia give to the most powerful Ainu in the world?  A little story about a Maia learning that the greatest gift he can offer is his time (and maybe a little gratuitous nudity).





	A Gift to Remember

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ceruleanshark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceruleanshark/gifts).



> For ceruleanshark, my enabler :)
> 
> No smut in the first scene, y’all are gonna have to wait till part 2 (3?). Enjoy!

The chisel struck the glass with a squeal, and its Song shattered.  Fragments of light sprayed across the workroom floor.  Mairon scooped up the slightest of the pieces and carried it delicately to the table, his hands already simmering, to place it amid the work of crystal and stone that currently occupied his focus.  Atop a round malachite base, sheets of glass and shards of precious gems already lay meticulously spliced together, forming a half-sphere of crystalline growths all piled atop one another like a landscape in miniature.  Melting the edges of the glass with the heat of his fingertips, Mairon lowered the sliver into place and hummed, his voice resonating through the molten material until the entire piece was alight with the reflection of his fire.  When the vibrations settled, the tiny sliver had melded with the rest to become an unbroken plane of blue: a mimicry of the sea, surrounded by malachite hills and quartz rivers, a thousand pieces assimilated into one perfect asset.

A miniature world, impossibly intricate and lovingly hand-pieced, speared through with intrusions of rubellite and volcanic glass: a recreation of Melkor’s grand descent to Arda.  Ever since Melkor had shown him the art of changing stone to sand and sand to glass, he had been experimenting, looking for a way to put his newfound knowledge to the perfect use.  The translucent material fascinated him: so utterly sleek to behold, yet at the microvocal level of the Music, so shockingly irregular in structure.  It seemed the perfect symbiosis between his own nature and the nature of his new lord.  So why not use it to create a masterpiece in tribute to Melkor’s work upon Arda - the very work that had made the art possible in the first place?  That single goal had driven him for days on end.  Perhaps, finally, this would be a gift worthy of his lord’s many blessings.

Mairon stepped back and ceased his humming, letting his form return to a more regular fluid shape.  The bright heat of his forge-form, searing as a star, sizzled away, leaving him clear and soft in the light of the hearth.  When working in the physical plane, he often preferred to take on the characteristics of the material he worked with, the better to attune himself to its properties; glass had been a more comfortable shape than most lately, new to his repertoire though it was.  The shimmer of the hearth’s reflection upon his molten skin and upon the intricate craft before him made him smile ever so slightly.  As he passed his eye critically over his progress, seeking to correct and refine, his gaze wandered higher: to the towering walls of his workshop, and the evidence of Melkor’s work displayed there.

Mairon’s forge had been his first real gift from Melkor, shaped for him in the nights following his pledge of loyalty to the First Vala.  It lay in the outermost rings of the grand caldera that his lord had made as his place of rest.  He knew the story of Utumno’s creation only in summary.  It had begun as flat ground, lightly shaped and barely inhabited, when Melkor first passed his music under it; the great heat that had billowed up there raised the land into a dome, visible for miles around.  When Melkor tired of the heights, he had engineered a great collapse beneath it, turning the fire at its heart into an explosion that blotted out even the distant clouds of Lord Manwë.  Then he had begun to dig, driving down and down into the deep, while great plates of earth broke and reformed around him, forcing one another into fantastic shapes through a stress Mairon could scarcely imagine.

That story unfolded before Mairon every time he raised his eyes.  In his forge, deep in the crust of Utumno’s mountainous rings, the stone was cut freely away and every year of its making was written there in the walls of his haven.  Dark basalt rivers, thicker than his own body, cut through thin ribbons of pale volcanic ash and layers of deep red rhyolite granite, all bent and folded like clay in the hands of a giant.  Melkor’s forging of Utumno had not been entirely harmless: at sparse places in the bedrock, Mairon could trace the faint outlines of shell or see protrusions of ancient bone.  Some of those bones he had revealed himself with careful chisels and brushes, seeking to know more of Melkor through his work.

Mairon gazed up at the story of creation sprawled around and above him, and in his heart he felt dismay begin to sink in.

What good was a little crystal globe in the face of all  _ this? _

“Mairon?”

Mairon’s Song quickened its pulse.  That was Melkor’s voice, echoing through the antechamber outside the heart of his forge.  Briefly he thought of covering up the half-finished globe with a cloth.  By the time he turned his head to look for one, though, Melkor was already entering the room.

Melkor.  He came in the form of one of Eru’s Second-born, but the weight of his presence sucked the breath out of the chamber.  His dark hair was bound in ropy braids at his skull and cascaded down over his shoulders; his skin glowed copper in the light of Mairon’s hearth.  Mairon’s Song fluttered beneath his translucent skin.

_ Bronze,  _ he thought.   _ I could work him in bronze, with a crown piece of blackstone, just like those braids.  I could mount it on a granite pedestal right at the mouth of the valley. _

Then again, this was the far North, not the halls of Aulë.  Who but Melkor and himself would stray out here to see it?  He admonished himself quietly even as he stood at attention, watching Melkor wander about the forge.

“You stopped Singing,” Melkor commented, his rich voice ringing off the walls.  “Is all well?”  Around them, the volcanic stone hummed at the touch of its master’s voice.

“I -- yes.”  As always, the first few seconds of seeing Melkor stole the fluidity of Mairon’s speech.  “Yes.  It is.  You -- you were listening?”

“Of course.  I heard you from the mountaintop.  Your Voice is beautiful.”  So matter-of-fact, the way he said it.  Melkor turned from his inspection of the space and settled a golden gaze on Mairon.  “Yet you speak as one distracted.  I fear I have interrupted you.”

“Surely not, my lord.”

“Surely not?  Now you are asking  _ me _ for confirmation.  I think you are not fully speaking your mind.”  The words fell playfully, but Mairon only twisted his hands behind his back.  Seeing this, Melkor stepped into his space and sought his eyes.  Mairon avoided them out of reflex, then wished he hadn’t.  Melkor reached behind him, untangled his fingers from one another, and held his hands up between them as if inspecting a fine piece of art.

“I think,” he continued, tracing the reflections of firelight across the back of Mairon’s glimmering hand, “that you have not been as forthcoming with me these past nights as you were before you came into my service.  A few months ago, you did not hesitate to tell me your true thoughts or chase me from your workspace at inopportune times.  Now you stand before me stiff as a stone, despite my abrupt entrance and the fact that you are clearly in the middle of a project.”

“A few months ago you were not my Vala,” Mairon answered, trying not to stare at the curve of amber light across Melkor’s cheekbone.  “Now you are.  I serve your will, inopportune timing or no.”

Melkor’s dark brows came together.  “I know this,” he said, bemused.  “You need not remind me by dropping every task the moment I enter the room.  I like hearing your true thoughts.  You should continue to tell me them, inopportune timing or no.”

The repetition of his own words, combined with a smile.  Humor, then.  He was forgiven.  Mairon’s  _ ëala _ breathed in relief when Melkor released his hands and turned away, dropping his eyes to Mairon’s work table, where the half-finished glass Arda lay sparkling.  “What is this?”

His stiffness returned -- he had not wanted that seen.  “Simply a project that is not going to plan,” he said airily, trying to brush it off.  “I have a mind to repurpose it.  The scale is not compatible with my original intentions for the piece.”

Melkor was crouching down at eye-level to peer at the glass.  A smile curled his lips when his eyes passed over the explosion of red jasper bursting from its core.  “Is this me?”

“It -- that was my intention.”

“I like it.”  So simple, but the words set golden notes trilling up and down Mairon’s skin.  He opened his mouth to thank him, but just like that Melkor’s attention was off again, sweeping away to behold Mairon’s other works.   _ Failed works,  _ he thought, casting his gaze away from the projects upon their shelves as each one fell under Melkor’s scrutiny.

He had wanted to create something grand.  Something that would encompass the glory he saw in Melkor, something that would set itself apart from every work that came before it, something that would show Melkor just how deeply Mairon valued and appreciated his lessons.  Something to return that gift, somehow.  His first idea had been a sword.  He had labored carefully over the blade, infusing it with a perpetual heat that would keep the blade glowing hot and alive even after its cooling.  He had planned to hilt it with obsidian and beryl, gems pulled from the crystallized fires of Melkor’s own subterranean forges.  He had scrapped the plan after realizing that it would in no way be special enough to convey what he wanted.  Melkor already had some of his blades, experimental and tested both; what was one more, however ornamental?  So he had abandoned that project for something else, and the cooled blade now lay hiltless on a shelf.

His next idea had been to carve and shape an enormous amethyst geode, layering it with glass and resin, for a perfectly round and polished sphere: a representation of Melkor’s cosmic form.  The original stone had risen to twice Mairon’s height; long he had worked it over, giving it depth and shimmer, so that when he looked into it he saw the blackness of the outer reaches and the dim glimmer of stars.  That idea had nearly come to completion before Mairon abandoned it as well.  It had been too symmetrical.  Too contained.  Melkor was none of that.  It wouldn’t have done him justice.

Which had led him to the glass globe.  At its onset, Mairon had thought it the perfect idea.  By striking through the suspended image of Arda with crystal spears of black and red, he had hoped to tell a story -- to recreate some of the chaos Arda had first experienced at Melkor’s hand.  It was to be an ideal fusion, a synthesis of heat-forged glass and raw mineral, a harmony between his own still nature and Melkor’s perpetual motion.  Mairon had burst out of a meditative rest five nights ago to begin work on it, so sure was he of himself and his inspiration.

And then how tiny it had proven to be.

Melkor’s voice punctured Mairon’s shame.  “They are beautiful,” he said, looking up at the rows of incomplete works.  “Such care for detail, even half-formed.  I would have expected nothing less from you.”

Mairon looked away, staring at the million-years’ stone arching above their heads and the fossilized life entombed in it.  “It hardly compares to your own work, my lord.”  

“It shouldn’t.  It is your work, not mine.  I like the difference.”  Melkor returned to Mairon and wrapped his arms around him from behind, unbothered by the molten heat.  “You refine the stuff of my work to heights I could scarce conceive of.  Everything you touch shines,” he murmured into Mairon’s ear, casting his gaze over the walls Mairon had so painstakingly polished.  “You will make this valley a work of art.  Having you with me is the greatest experience I have yet known.”

Warmth seeped from the heart of Melkor’s Song into Mairon’s own.  He leaned his head back into Melkor’s shoulder to gaze at him; Melkor pressed his lips to Mairon’s mouth, to his forehead, to his cheek.  A spark rippled through Mairon at each point of contact, coloring his glassy skin red and golden, making his Vala’s smile wider.  No other Valar treated their Maiar this way, as far as he knew.  Pride bloomed in his core and shimmered across his skin.  He was the sole recipient of this strange, but vibrant, affection.  The thought both heated and sobered him.  

Yet another gift he had yet to repay.

Melkor held him for a moment more, his face pressed into the crook of Mairon’s neck.  Then, with an appreciative hum, he pulled away.  The fire in the hearth flickered in the wake of his heavy mantle as he passed, heading for the doorway, the echo of his boots sharp against the stone floor.  “You will find your inspiration.  I have no doubt,” he said over his shoulder.  “Come to me when your work is done.  I would teach you something new.”  He didn’t need to wait for an answer; his shadow passed through the archway and the sounds of him receded, leaving Mairon alone with the half-finished glass globe, staring at it.

So much for repurposing the materials.  He heaved a sigh, picked it up and placed it on a shelf, alongside half a dozen other abandoned gifts.  Then he returned to his work table and simply sat, head in his hands, drowning himself in thought.

—*—


End file.
